by Taiye Selasi
“Twenty-nine,” they say in unison, the same husky tone.
“October,” offers Kehinde. “We’ll be thirty next October.”
“And you.” He turns to Sadie, next to Kehinde, less obscured. “You . . . were just a glimmer in—”
“My ovary,” says Fola. Preempting. “More precisely.”
“That’s obscene,” Sadie says. This is the part she dreads most: when the stranger starts asking their ages, what each of them does. She senses it coming just as sure as a key change the moment a pop song approaches its bridge and looks ruefully at the man at the head of the table, wondering why he is here but not minding too much. At least with a guest, there’s a guise for the dolor that hovered above them in silence before, doubly massive for being unnamed, unacknowledged, the size of itself and its shadow, a blob. Now they can pin, each, their anguish to Benson, who took the seat no one else wanted to take and who said the thing no else wanted to say and who cut the grim picture in half with his flowers. He is the reason they all sit so upright, speak softly, smile politely, because there’s a Guest, as ensconced in the drama that attends family dinners (even absent a death in the family) as they, but a visitor, an innocent, in need of protection. They must ensure, all, that the Guest is okay. She smiles at him wanly. “Right. I was born later. I’m Sadie.”
Ling contributes her finger bell laugh. “Ovaries aren’t ‘obscene.’”
Turning quickly to Benson, “She’s an ob-gyn. I’m in ortho,” Olu says.
“Two doctors!” exclaims Benson. “So it runs in the family. I didn’t get your first name.” Ling tells him. “Well, Ling. Ghana is wanting for excellent doctors, foremost in obstetrics and maternal and child health. I opened a little hospital in town seven years ago. We still have a wait list for consults.” He laughs. “We could also use surgeons,” with a gesture to Olu, “and knowing your father, I know that you’re good.” He pauses. They all do. To see where he’s going, to see if the Guest is now stuck in the weeds, but he laughs again softly and presses on strongly, “The top of our class at Johns Hopkins, bar none. No one could touch him. And I don’t mean the Africans. No one was better. No one even came close. I remember when he got there I thought, who’s this bumpkin? From this Lincoln University? Never heard of it before. I should have, I know it. God. Kwame Nkrumah. But I’d been in Poland, of all places, for school. Funny times, those. Cold war scholarships for Africans. You could study in Warsaw and not pay a dime. I arrived in East Baltimore with an Eastern Bloc accent. I think they all thought I was deaf for a while.” Another laugh. “But we managed. We banded together. Everybody wanted to be friends with your dad. And Kweku was . . .” He pauses, smiling, turning to Fola. Seeing her face, he turns back. “He was shy. A geek, if we’re honest. But handsome, so meticulous. All the girls loved him. But he only loved one.”
Fola says, “Really. I don’t think—”
“Keep going,” says Sadie, not loudly. “He only loved one?”
Benson looks at Fola, who tips her head, sighing. He looks back at Sadie, returns the sad smile. “There were four of us. Africans—well, five counting Trevor. Jamaican—”
“Trinidadian,” Fola corrects.
“Ah, right. Trinidadian. Five of us brethren,” says Benson. “Prodigious, but desperately poor. We got stipends with our scholarships but blew them on airfare so no one had much; we shared all that we had. We used to eat dinner together, in rotation, so Monday to Friday a different one cooked. Wednesday was Kweku. He always cooked banku. We hated his banku; it tasted like glue. But we’d all get there early to talk to your mother. Or stare at her. No one could work up the nerve. And we’d look at your father, this shy guy from Ghana, not strapping like Trevor, or tall, not like me, with these shirts buttoned up to the uppermost button like a Ghanaian Lumumba, with glasses—with her.”
A silence has settled on all of them, thickly. They stare at the flowers as if at a hearse. No one quite knows what the other is thinking or whether to speak and reveal the wrong thought.
Finally, Fola. “For goodness sake, Benson.” She laughs with such sadness, they start to laugh, too. “That isn’t what happened—”
“It’s true—”
“No, it isn’t. He also made bacon and eggs. Which were worse.” She stands up to pick out a fern from the rice pot. “The food’s getting cold,” she says. “Eat,” and they do.
Joloff, egusi. They muddle through bravely, evading fraught silence with pleasant requests: pass the wine please, what time is it, do you have enough space there, more wine please, what’s in this, should we open another bottle? When Fola observes that the questions are waning, she stands, disappears, and returns with the cake. “I am not to be forgiven,” she says, “for not writing or calling on time, but I didn’t forget.” She sings the first notes, then the rest join in, smiling, while Sadie sits blushing and chewing her lip. On the last long “to yooou . . . !” Fola settles the cake on the tabletop, bending over Sadie to do so and pausing, so stationed, to kiss her and say, “You were right,” and that’s that, the thing finished, “talked out.” Taiwo and Kehinde say “The wish!,” again in unison, which makes them both frown and which makes Benson laugh. “So they really are twins!” That daft oft-repeated comment, which makes Olu tense. He recovers and chuckles. Sadie laughs, too, suddenly noticing the candle: one big white utility candle dripping thick wax. She starts to ask why, glancing back at her mother, who shrugs, laughing also, then changes her mind. The sturdier the candle, she thinks, leaning forward, the better for bearing such wishes.
ii
Taiwo retreats to the den after dinner, three shallow steps down from the dining room table. She sits on the love seat’s strange orange plaid wool with a copy of Ghana Ovation. Behind her Fola, at the table with Benson, is discussing the tradition of fantasy coffins; she hears them there, faintly, conferring in whispers like grown-ups evading the hearing of children. They felt like that, children, she thinks, during dinner, as watchful and rule-bound as Catholic school pupils—and wonders why all of them do this, still now, even now, the African Filial Piety act? Lowered eyes, lowered voices, feigned shyness, bent shoulders, the curse of their culture, exaltation of deference, that beaten-in impulse to show oneself obedient and worthy of praise for one’s reverence of Order (never mind that the Order is crumbling, corrupted, departed, dysfunctional; respect must be shown it). She loathes them for doing it, herself and her siblings, the house staff, her African classmates. Quite simply, she isn’t convinced that “respect” is the basis, not for them the respectful nor for them the respected. She suspects that it’s laziness, a defaulting to the familiar, or cowardice in the former and power in the latter. Most African parents, she’d guess, grew up powerless, with no one on whom to impose their own will, and so bully their children, through beatings and screaming, to lighten the load of postcolonial angst . . .
or assorted observations along the same lines, when she flips to a page and is yanked back from thought. By the name first. The caption, fine print amid faces (weddings, polo matches, funerals, glossy chaos of society photos), “Femi and Niké Savage at . . . ,” and then by the photograph:
the shoes
and suit
and shirt
and neck
and smile
and nose
and eyes.
Those eyes.
Black, thick-lidded eyes gazing back at her, red-rimmed, the wild sort of gaze of a man on a drug, matching smile (hard, unfocused), the wife there beside him gone ashen with age, the new wig a blond bob.
She hurls the magazine across the room, gut reaction. It lands with the splatter of pages on wood. Fola and Benson look up from the table. “Darling?” says Fola, but Taiwo can’t speak. “What is it? What happened?”
“A bug,” breathes out Taiwo. She points to the magazine splayed on the floor. “I was k-killing a bug.”
“Ah, yes. Welcome to Ghana
.” Benson doesn’t notice her tremulous voice. “That reminds me. Are you all on antimalarial medication? The mosquitoes can be killer. I’ve got Aralen in the car.” Taiwo shakes her head. “I’ll go grab it. No worries. I might just have enough to get you started for now.” He glances at Fola as he stands from the table.
Fola nods, distracted. “Great, thanks,” as he goes.
iii
Fola stands also and stares at her daughter, aware of a heartbeat too fast and too loud, throbbing ache, lower right, where she has the small scar from the day she went tumbling down the stairs with the girl. Almost hard to believe she was just twenty-eight, half a lifetime away, with three children (first girl: a complete mystery to her mother next to Olu and Kehinde, a new thing entirely, more perilous somehow). Already at one she was beautiful, Taiwo. They both were. Wherever they went, they were stopped. Strangers always thought they were both baby girls and would gush in high voices, “How beauuutiful.” They were. But it made Fola nervous. To handle such children. Too precious, too perfect, the girl in particular, like a very expensive gift made of breakable material that one should just look at and try not to touch. Kehinde was easy, like Olu, even easier, but Taiwo would cry whenever Fola put her down and would wail without pause until Fola returned—only Fola, never Kweku—to pick her back up. It was this that confused her: how much Fola liked this, the thrill she’d receive when she picked up the girl, and she’d immediately stop crying to smile at her mother, to cling to her, burying her face in her neck. The neediness touched her, overwhelmed her, unhinged her; she worried about favoring or spoiling the child, or confusing her, leading her to believe that the world was less patently apathetic than it actually was.
On the occasion of note she was washing the babies in the bathtub upstairs when the front doorbell rang. It was Olu, then five, driven home by a teacher who lived down the street and now honked, pulling off. The door was at the bottom of those two narrow staircases, too long a trip down with the twins unattended. She picked them up, dripping suds, one in each arm, and went rushing down the stairs to get Olu. And slipped. She can remember the feeling still now, that pure panic that flooded her lungs as her slipper flew out and her back hit the stairs and she tumbled down clinging to babies’ wet skin slick with sweet-smelling suds. When she came to a stop she was holding Kehinde only, having somehow nicked her ribcage on the stair edge, and bleeding. Taiwo had landed, by some act of mercy, at the bottom of the staircase completely unharmed. She was sitting there staring as Fola rose, bleeding, her arms around Kehinde. Not crying, just staring. But the look in the eyes was more piercing than screaming. The eyes seemed to say you let go, you let me go. Those eyes—which she’d found so unnerving, in the beginning, having only ever seen them in a painting, unblinking—now stared at her, heartbroken, heartbreaking, accusing: a dead woman’s eyes on a baby girl’s face.
Olu pressed the doorbell, and Taiwo started crying. At his sister’s distress Kehinde promptly started wailing. Fola started screaming in her head; crying silently, she opened the door to stunned Olu. “Hold your brother.” Olu took Kehinde, and Fola grabbed Taiwo, ushering them all up the stairs and away from the cold. But the girl kept on crying, a very tired cry, untiringly, for hours, until evening when her father came home.
Fola looks at Taiwo and can feel the girl’s heaving, her wide eyes unyielding, dry, heartbroken, seething. This is the thing that has come in between them, this rage, Fola knows, since the twins went to Lagos—but neither will tell her what happened with Femi, and Sena, who found them, alleged not to know. There was just the one phone call at sunrise in summer ten months from the day that she left them at Logan: Uncle Sena, last seen on a tarmac in Ghana, now calling from Nigeria at five in the morning. “I knew they were yours from the moment I saw them. Those are Somayina’s grandkids, I said to myself,” Sena blubbered while Fola sat fumbling for a light switch, still sleeping on the couch. “From the beginning. Start again.”
His story was confusing—the more for the static, and how Sena told it, both rushing and halting, conflicted, determined to help, hiding something—but Fola got the gist of it. The first bit she knew:
when her father was murdered his mistress decided his house was now hers and moved in with their son. The two lived together as queen and little prince running a brothel for soldiers through the end of Biafra. In this way young Femi began his career as a dealer of women, small arms, and cocaine, striking out on his own as an underworld wunderkid when Bimbo OD’d at the end of the war. This Fola learned on her last trip to Lagos, in 1975, to beg Femi for help, having heard from a Nigerian in Baltimore by chance that her brother was knee deep in naira. Reunion. They’d never been close. He was four years her junior. He’d come to the house now and then with his mother, this Bimbo, a tall, hard, and wiry woman who in another life may well have modeled, not whored. Her father had never sought to hide them from Fola (“her mother was dead and a man had his needs”), and she knew that the boy who would wait in the kitchen while Bimbo went upstairs was her aburo.
But didn’t care. Had never even thought the names Bimbo and Femi—they were extras, unnamed in the cast of her youth, without lines, manly woman and womanly boy—until then, when she learned of the money. Too late. Femi alleged that he thought she had died with their father that night in the fire in Kaduna; otherwise, he claimed, he would never have excluded her entirely from their father’s inheritance. Alas. Too late now to redistribute the monies but Fola need only but ask for his help; they were siblings after all, you could see the resemblance, never mind that their father never claimed him as a son. Fola left Lagos with the money she needed to get to Accra to see Kweku’s ill mum, but vowed never again to give Femi the pleasure of offering help. She broke this vow for the twins.
This time her brother refused to send cash but proposed a small trade as an alternative solution: if Fola would send her ibeji to him, he would pay all their school fees plus college tuition. At some point he’d wed the only daughter of a general turned oil entrepreneur; he was tricked, she was barren. Having ibeji in the household might “cure” this wife Niké, he explained, as ibeji were magic. A deal. Fola sent the twins to Nigeria in August and forty weeks later Sena sent them back home.
From what she can gather, her twisted half-brother had hosted some bacchanal that Sena attended (the details, to do with drugs, prostitutes, orgy, have always been largely unclear). Sena had his own tragic tale to unburden: of expulsion from Lagos under “Ghana Must Go,” winter 1983, with the Nigerian government’s summarily deporting two million Ghanaians; of return to East Cantonments, impecunious and affronted, to build up a practice from scratch in Accra, only two fragile years past a barbarous coup in his homeland, no longer his home; death of parents. One hard decade on—his first week back in Lagos, having arrived at a house party driven by friends, unaware that the house was Kayo Savage’s townhouse, unaware that the party was Femi’s—he found them. Just saw them there huddled up, children among adults, and knew who they were and that something was wrong; they were both wearing makeup and spoke as if drugged, in a monotone, clutching their elbows, eyes down. He took them at once in the clothes they were wearing, got a taxi to the Sheraton in Ikeja where he was staying, called at midnight in a panic to explain he was sending them back on the first thing moving. End of story.
She drove in the dirty blue hatchback, four hours, got to JFK early, and sat there and waited, not moving, not eating, just clutching her stomach, asking Jesus her friend to go easy this time. They appeared in arrivals in thin summer clothing, the lipstick rubbed off to a bloodstain, dark orange, their hands clasped together, their eyes still turned downward, too skinny, not speaking, not Kehinde, not Taiwo. How many times did she ask them to tell her? “Just tell me what happened,” “Please tell me,” “I’m begging.” She telephoned Femi; she screamed, wept, and threatened. “How dare you take my darlings away?” Femi sneered. And hung up. They were shadows. They slept in the daytime and whispered at
night in the bedroom they shared in that house that she loathed, with no yard to grow flowers. She couldn’t afford therapy but begged for financial aid. The prep school assented on the basis of Olu’s spectacular performance the four years before. They started in autumn as freshmen, repeating the year they’d just done at international school, Kehinde quiet and sullen, Taiwo restless and furious, the both of them mute on the subject of why.
She still doesn’t know.
She looks at Taiwo unknowingly, so longing to hold her, to squeeze out this why—and the sorrow and fury and shadow out with it, to hold her so tightly it all rushes forth, leaving breath bubbling out as when Taiwo was one and still longed to be held, and by her. But she can’t. She imagines that baby—slick-wet and defenseless, in every sense, naked and mute where she’d dropped her—and seizes with guilt, a ghost, half a life later. She wants to but can’t take the three steps between them.
“What happened . . . ?” she asks weakly from the dining room table, but Taiwo doesn’t hear and walks away.
iv
Kehinde finds Sadie in the garden in a beach chair, her feet on the palm trunk, eyes closed, tilting back. The distance from the house to the edge of the garden is such that no light source illumines this spot. There is only the starlight, a thin coat of silver that muddies the blackness a dark opaque gray. He hesitates for a moment in the shadow behind her, not sure if she’s sleeping. “May I join you?” he asks. She hasn’t heard the footsteps and starts, veering forward.
“You scared me,” she gasps. “It’s so dark. You’re so quiet.”
He whispers, embarrassed, “I’m sorry.”
